Taking the virtual city experience to the next level

AROUNDER gives travelers a vivid sense of what a city has to offer: historical cathedrals and works of art, museums featuring famous artists, local cafes and stores, breathtaking mountain-top views, quiet parks and gardens. Each issue contains a series of interesting panoramas giving you a full immersible view of the cities. Navigation is easy with Google maps of the city and surrounding area. Every issue also links to local merchants with virtual tours of hotels, restaurants, spas and stores.

The nucleus of the AROUNDER concept is the virtual  tour - fullscreen 360-degree photographic panoramas, which enable the  user to pan left, right, up and down - a far superior format than the standard  photograph as it gives the viewer a real sense of actually 'being there'.  Users can click on hotspots within each panorama to move on to another  panorama, and thus take a virtual tour. Each panorama within the series  highlights a historic point of interest within that city - such as cathedrals or old  town squares, and places where a tourist would visit if physically in  that city - museums, parks, local marketplaces and seaside promenades.

Of course if you are into virtual touring, there are plenty of sites offering similar content to Arounder. One of them is 360cities, claiming to be the web’s largest collection of stunning, georeferenced panoramic photos. 360cities is created maintained and enriched with new content, by a network of thousands of panorama photographers from around the world.

AirPano is a Moscow based group of photo enthusiasts, dedicated to creating hi-resolution aerial panoramas. They focus on aerial 360 reproductions, photographing from helicopters, light jets, dirigibles, hot air balloons, or radio-controlled helicopters.

There are also sites for 360 panoramas dedicated to specific themes, like the 7 wonders than you can see here, or country specific portals, like this one for the fjords of Norway.